BIG NEW 52 (PART 2)

As for DC Comics’ touted outreach to the New Reader, it’s clear that the reader DC has in mind is not the reader for whom comic books tailored their stories from 1938 until the mid-1980s. The New 52 is aimed at an older reader, not a juvenile audience. The older reader might be a former reader who, as he/she grew older, outgrew (or thought he/she outgrew) comics. Or the new reader might be a former comics enthusiast who enjoyed the movie version of his adolescent heroes and now returns to the four-color pamphlet universe to see how, and if, things have changed. But in any configuration, the new reader is older, maybe with a ravening case of arrested development, but older chronologically anyhow.

The target audience for comics grew older in the 1960s when Stan Lee and Marvel Comics found readers in college. And then the target age leaped forward with Frank Miller’s Dark Knight of 1986, and ever since, comic book readers have been envisioned by comic book makers as older, and the stories have been aimed at that reader. So DC is doing nothing particularly new with its New 52; but it is making recognition of that target much more overt. Alas, it’s doing it with boobs and bomb-throwing and new costumes instead of themes and issues.

The new reader is not necessarily a fan of cleavage and disembowelment to exclusion of all other considerations, but he/she is not the reader that made Fawcett’s Captain Marvel the title that outsold Superman in the 1940s. The new reader is, instead, more like the original reader envisioned by Harry Donenfeld and his cohorts when they took over Major Malcolm Nicholson-Wheeler’s staggering line of comics in 1938. Early comic books, judging from the advertising they carried, were not aimed exclusively at pre-teen readers. With their reprints of newspaper comic strips, early comic books aimed at adult readers—and their children, but chiefly, at first, at the adults who bought pulp magazines. It was Superman who changed that focus.

When Donenfeld learned that the early issues of Action Comics were selling out because they were being purchased by kids who wanted to see what deeds Superman would do next, he and his minions re-focused their efforts, aiming, henceforth, at that pre-adolescent audience. In their eagerness to make a buck, comic book publishers, with Donenfeld’s gang showing the way, abandoned an infant artform’s potential and consigned the form to juvenile literature for two generations.

And now, DC, again eager to make a buck, has made obvious the change that the medium has effected for the last generation, returning to that long ago abandoned adult reader.